Tutorials Audio

Clean Audio for Podcasts

Beginner · ~60 min

Overview

Good podcast audio isn't about expensive gear. It's about controlling your environment and knowing two or three techniques in post. This guide covers both.

What You Need

Any USB microphone (even a basic one works)
Audacity (free) or GarageBand (free on Mac)
A reasonably quiet room

Steps

Treat your room first

Sit in a corner, walls reflect less than open space. Add soft furnishings: a duvet behind you, a bookshelf in front, a rug below. Hard flat surfaces are the enemy. You're building a recording booth with what you already own.

Set your input level correctly

Your mic level should peak between −12dB and −6dB when speaking normally. Too quiet and you amplify noise when you boost in post. Too loud and you clip (which is unrecoverable). Set this before recording a single word.

Record 10 seconds of room tone

Sit silently and record the ambient noise before every session. This captures your room's unique background hum, which you'll use as a profile for noise reduction.

Apply noise reduction

In Audacity: select your room tone clip → Effect → Noise Reduction → Get Noise Profile. Then select your whole recording → Effect → Noise Reduction → OK. Start with 12dB reduction, sensitivity 6.

Compress your audio

Compression evens out the difference between quiet and loud moments. In Audacity: Effect → Compressor. Use Threshold: −18dB, Ratio: 3:1, Attack: 0.2s. This makes your voice sit more consistently in the mix.

Normalise to −16 LUFS

This is the target loudness for most podcast platforms (Spotify, Apple Podcasts). In Audacity: Effect → Loudness Normalization → −16 LUFS. Do this last, after all other processing.

Pro Tips

Record in mono, not stereo, for voice-only podcasts. Halves the file size with no quality loss.
Edit breaths and long pauses before you compress. You'll get cleaner, more consistent results.
Always listen back on headphones before publishing.

Knowledge Base

Professional Podcast Audio

The difference between amateur and professional podcasts isn't expensive gear, it's clean, consistent audio. Learn the recording techniques, mixing settings, and loudness standards that make your voice sound broadcast-ready on every listener's device.

The Foundation: Room & Recording

Your recording environment shapes everything. A quiet room with soft furnishings beats an expensive microphone in a hard, reflective space. Before touching your DAW, optimize your physical setup.

Choose Your Space. Smallest room available with carpet, curtains, bookshelves. Soft materials absorb sound. Hard surfaces (tile, concrete) create echo.
Position Correctly. Mic 6 to 8 inches from mouth. Closer causes plosives and distortion. Farther sounds thin and distant. Consistency matters more than perfection.
Monitor Levels. Gain peaks between -12 and -6 dB. Provides enough headroom that loud passages don't clip, yet captures your full voice. Wear headphones to hear exactly what the DAW records.
Eliminate Rumble. Keep your mic away from desk vibrations (boom arm is ideal). Air conditioning and fans create low-frequency hum that high-pass filtering removes in post.

The Mix: Shaping Your Sound

Your raw recording is the canvas. Compression, EQ, and normalization are the tools that transform it from decent to broadcast-quality. Apply these in order: compression first (controls dynamics), then EQ (shapes tone), then loudness correction.

Step 1
Compression

Glue Your Voice Together

Settings: 4:1 ratio, -20 dB threshold, 10ms attack, 100ms release. This gentle compression prevents loud words from jumping out and quiet words from disappearing. Aim for 3 to 6 dB of gain reduction on average passages, if you're hitting 10+ dB, the effect becomes noticeable and artificial.

Step 2
Equalization

Add Presence & Remove Mud

High-Pass Filter: Set at 80 Hz to remove rumble (traffic, HVAC, desk vibrations). Presence Boost: +2 to 3 dB at 3 to 5 kHz makes your voice clearer and more energetic on earbuds and phone speakers where presence is often missing.

Step 3
Normalization

Leave Headroom

After compression and EQ, normalize your peak to -3 dB. This prevents clipping while giving you room to add fade-outs, transitions, or music without digital distortion.

Step 4
Loudness

Target -16 LUFS for All Platforms

Use a loudness meter (Youlean Loudness Meter is free) to measure your integrated LUFS across the full episode. Apple Podcasts and Spotify both normalize to -16 LUFS, so mixing to this standard ensures your episode plays at the same volume as others.

Multi-Guest Recordings

When recording multiple voices (host + guest), record each on a separate audio track. This gives you individual control: compress the guest's voice more if they're dynamic, boost their EQ if they sound thin, and ensure both voices sit at equal loudness in the final mix. If you compress them together, one loud voice can trigger compression that affects the other.

Common Questions

Q: How aggressively should I compress?

Gentle is always better. 3–6 dB gain reduction sounds natural and professional. 10+ dB compression is noticeable and sounds "squashed"—only use that amount if you're going for a stylized effect.

Q: What if my room is noisy?

Noise reduction in post-production is last-resort. If your recording has constant noise (AC hum, fan), mild noise reduction (6–8 dB) helps without degrading your voice. But the best fix is recording in a quieter space or using soft furnishings to absorb noise.

Q: Should I use a gate to remove background noise?

Gates can work but are risky—they abruptly cut off audio when it drops below a threshold, creating unnatural silence. Gentle compression and high-pass filtering are safer choices that maintain natural breathing and ambience.

Q: Why do my levels look different on my DAW vs. on my phone?

DAW monitors are often bright; phone speakers compress dynamic range. Always reference your mix on your phone speakers and earbuds before finalizing. What sounds right on your monitor may be boomy on phones or too quiet on earbuds.

Where This Fits

This guide covers one specific part of podcasting. The wider picture. The whole setup from equipment and recording through editing, publishing, and handling remote guests, is in Best Podcast Setup for Beginners, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.